Whispers: August 4, 2008

Deutsche Bank has promoted Ido Gonen to run its Latin American securitization team, according to a spokesperson at the bank. The banker replaces Brigitte Posch, who recently left to work at Pacific Investment Management Co. (ASR, 7/16/08). He will have tough shoes to fill. Posch worked eight years at Moody's Investors Service, where she earned a reputation for rigor among Brazilian and Mexican clients before hopping over to Ambac for a remarkably short stint of six months, and then Deutsche. Gonen was also at Moody's for a roughly two-year stretch, working primarily in U.S. RMBS, according to a source at the agency. He's been at Deutsche since July 2005. Gonen didn't return a call for comment, while Pimco hasn't returned calls or an e-mail requesting information on Posch's new title and responsibilities.

Roberto Watanabe, who left the same team at Deutsche Bank a few months ago, has been working for local Brazilian brokers Planner Corretora de Valores. Heading up the debt capital markets of this outfit, Watanabe said he was focused on middle-market corporate clients: "the market not covered by the major international investment banks." This rubric covers companies with revenue of between $100 million and $700 million. As he had at Deutsche, Watanabe will arrange receivable investment funds (FIDCs), the ABS financing vehicle prevalent in Brazil. He will also be working on plain vanilla funding. Planner is in the process of obtaining a license as a broker-dealer in New York, which will facilitate selling Brazilian deals offshore, Watanabe added. Before Planner, Watanabe spent about a year and a half at Deutsche, and nearly three years at Moody's Investors Service before that. As of press time, a spokesperson at Deutsche hadn't returned a request for comment on whether he had been replaced on the Latin American ABS team of the German bank, either internally or with an outside hire.

Armins Rusis joined Markit last week as executive vice president and global co-head of fixed income. Rusis will share responsibility for the firm's data and analytics products with Kevin Gould, executive vice president and founder of Markit. Most recently, Rusis was managing director and head of U.S. credit trading and global head of securitized and structured credit trading at Morgan Stanley, where he worked for 17 years. He was a member of the firm's European management committee as well as its fixed income operating committee, and also served as the Morgan Stanley board director of Markit for three years.

Clifford Chance plans to open a new office in Abu Dhabi on Aug. 3. Graham Lovett, managing partner for the Gulf region, will be responsible for the office along with banking and finance partner Richard Ernest. The duo will lead an initial team of 10 lawyers in the new location. Ernest has been with the firm for 11 years and has worked in Clifford Chance's London, Moscow and Frankfurt offices. Peter Deegan, a partner in real estate and currently based in the firm's Warsaw office, will relocate to Abu Dhabi, and capital markets partner Chris Walsh will be seconded from London to the office. The new group will focus on finance, capital markets projects, corporate, real estate and litigation. The Abu Dhabi office is expected to grow to 20 to 30 lawyers in the next two to three years because of the growing demand in that region.

Barclays Capital has appointed Anatoly Nakum as a managing director and head of high-grade and crossover flow trading in the U.S. fixed-income division. Nakum will be responsible for the firm's U.S. flow credit trading business, including cash bonds and CDS. He will be based in New York and report to Doug Warren, managing director and head of North American credit trading. Nakum joins Barclays Capital from Deutsche Bank, where he held many roles in credit trading over a nine-year period; including head of investment-grade CDS/cash trading. Prior to Deutsche, he worked at Sumitomo Bank and Bankers Trust.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) named Jon Pain as its new managing director of retail markets and Clive Adamson as director of the major retail groups division, and announced the probable departure of Chief Operating Officer David Kenmir. In his new position, Pain will be responsible for regulating firms or groups whose business is predominantly with retail consumers, including high street banks, building societies, insurance companies, mortgage lenders, retail financial services intermediaries and 17,000 smaller firms engaged in the mortgage advice, insurance broking and investment advice sectors. Most recently, Pain was managing director of Cheltenham & Gloucester. Adamson will maintain the FSA major retail groups division's (MRGD) supervisory relationship with overseas regulators in the key G10 countries. He has been acting director of MRGD since last April and was previously an FSA senior advisor since 1998. Before working with the FSA, Adamson was senior vice president and regional head at Bank of America with the responsibility for business across U.K. and North Europe. Additionally, COO and acting managing director of retail markets Kenmir has said he wants to step down from the FSA in order to pursue other career opportunities in the new year. The FSA said a search for a successor will begin shortly.

The Mortgage Bankers Association appointed James Gross as associate vice president of accounting, tax and bank regulation. Gross will succeed Alison Utermohlen, senior director of accounting policy, who is retiring after 20 years in this role. In his new role, Gross will help develop and implement MBA's strategy on legislative, regulatory and industry issues in the areas of accounting and tax policy and bank regulatory capital. He will also be the staff representative on MBA's financial management committee. Previously, Gross served as the Chief Financial Officer for NetBank. He has also served as CFO or controller for a number of small and mid-size banks and major mortgage banks.

Broadpoint Securities, a broker-dealer subsidiary of Broadpoint Securities Group, hired four professionals in its MBS and ABS division, Broadpoint DESCAP. The new hires include Richard Weissman, Maneesh Awasthi, Ekaterina Baron and Viru Raparthi. Weissman, a managing director specializing in MBS and ABS sales with Broadpoint Securities, spent 13 years at RBS-Greenwich Capital in a similar capacity. Before RBS-GCM, he was the MBS sales manager and head of the MBS strategies group at Nomura Group from 1989 to 1994. Awasthi has more than 11 years of experience in fixed income with more than eight years of experience in the structured credit space. Prior to Broadpoint Securities, Awasthi ran the CDO squared platform on the structuring side at Citigroup, where he specialized in complex cash/synthetic transactions across the bank debt and structured credit space. Baron, senior vice president at Broadpoint, has eight years of origination and structuring experience in structured finance. She began her career in the global markets division at JPMorgan Securities in credit card ABS banking and then worked at GE Capital and Barclays Capital, where she focused on consumer ABS and other structured products. Raparthi has more than six years of experience in the financial services industry and more than nine years of experience in the oil & gas industry. Before Broadpoint, Raparthi was a senior structurer and CDO banker at Rabobank.